


Run Until the Dawn

by chouxxing



Series: the sinking sun [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Attempt at Humor, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Found Family Because I Have No Self-Restraint, Friendship, Gen, Liberal Use of Dark Humor, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Perhaps Too Much Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Self-Insert, Slow Burn, So much violence, Third Shinobi War, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:13:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25286635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chouxxing/pseuds/chouxxing
Summary: There's only so many hours of darkness before the light. I didn't realize that I was losing myself until I stumbled and found my voice to be gone.In which a second chance has unimaginable consequences.[Semi-SI/OC FIC]
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Original Male Character(s), Namikaze Minato/Uzumaki Kushina, Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s)
Series: the sinking sun [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1865902
Comments: 12
Kudos: 53





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this out of spite. Pettiness is a great motivator. Thank you to my Discord friends for cheering me on!  
> Not edited.

I was dropped on my head as a child.

And why didn’t you die, one may ask? Well, the answer is that I did. My skull cracked like an eggshell, my tiny heart ground to a halt, and at the fresh age of three months, I perished from the inattentive hands of a seven year old child.

It wasn’t fun, dattebayo.

As I was bundled in a threadbare cloth, and placed atop a mound of trash to be burned into a crisp pile of ash, I drew breath and wailed hours after I had, in all technicalities, passed away. The poor sap in charge of the waste that day had the scare of his life, and almost hurled me into the incinerator. Which would have been disastrous, as I’m sure I wouldn’t have survived _that._

This particular memory I don’t remember, but Sayu (the seven year old murderer) gleefully recounted the event to me–– _and you went splat! Just like rotten fruit!_ ––as I got older. Childhood trauma, in her opinion, was a perfectly fine bedtime story. If you ask me, I totally blame that for messing with my sense of morals in the first place.

Well, that, and I was raised in a brothel. 

A well-to-do red-light district establishment, my infant years were spent being passed around from kid to kid, apprentices and reluctant laundry women alike stuffing me into baskets or blankets. All while the majority of the adults in the building cleverly pawed their way through the coin purses of wealthy customers. You can’t possibly expect a healthy kid to grow up in a place where he watches inebriated customers stumble through the doors the moment the sun sets.

Tsubaki, (never call me mother, she had told me. It made her feel old.) excelled at her job, and she had the mile-long list of clients to prove it. My Before mother was a kind woman, with a sunny smile, and a near-fanatic obsession with city pop. Tsubaki, on the other hand, was an immature person, and she never truly gave a single effort to raise me. She complained on several occasions that I was the product of a drunken night, which quickly quashed my dreams of meeting my father. Family hours were instead relegated to me watching her brush her hair as she griped about her customers, and frankly, I had (still have) the attention span of a gnat.

Case in point, I didn’t even begin by explaining what the Before is. 

See, my memories aren’t from this world. Or dimension. 

I won’t go as far as to claim that my mind was perfectly transplanted into a wholly new body. It’d be more accurate to explain that who I currently am is more of an amalgamation between my past and current selves. The reason for this wasn’t particularly hard to parse. My brain going through the omelet treatment had killed my baby self, but in turn, had jumpstarted my past memories. I’m me. The Before version of myself is also me.

I really don’t know the mechanics of the process, but I handwaved it away with the word “magic” a few years back, and promptly squashed the entire concept into some far-off portion of my mind. Pondering my mortality gave me a headache.

Living in a version of feudal Japan was weird. Sometimes I’d recall things like a “television” or a “smartphone” through a hazy memory, and then I’d walk outside to see a funerary shrine being crafted for the blacksmith’s son, bless his soul, who died from a rusty nail. The disconnect between worlds was jarring, and for a few awkward months, I was gripped with the irrational fear that I’d pass away from an undetected tetanus infection.

Still, I considered my memory situation to be a lucky one. There was no saying how fucked up I would get if I didn’t have handfuls of happy experiences to vicariously live through when the going got tough. Being a kid who survived off of scraps of food and was worked to nigh-exhaustion weekly, I would’ve probably become the type of guy who drowned mice for amusement if I didn’t recall my previous life.

I’ll gloss over the bits where I learned how to walk, talk, and use the “big boy toilet”. Those events weren’t particularly important milestones in my life, and to be perfectly honest, it’s an incredibly frustrating experience to be able to comprehend movement while simultaneously having underdeveloped infantile limbs. Doubly so when all heights are bad heights to fall from.

The process went something like this: I took my first step. I said a word. I took some more steps. I fell. I said some curse words.

Understandably, the people around me didn’t pay enough attention to realize that I was developing faster than the average child, (which was good for me, as I had no idea how the physical progression of normal babies worked.) If they noticed me muttering in a completely different language, they must’ve chalked it up to toddler babble, and ignored me. Granted, I didn’t really say any English phrases beyond repeating “fuck” whenever my too-large head was acquainted the ground, but I wasn’t sure what I'd do if my aptitude at a completely foreign language was noticed.

Actually, I’d probably scream if somebody pointed that out. But that’s beside the point.

By the time I was old enough to become a nuisance to the laundry women, I was unceremoniously handed off to some of the older children for a quasi-training regimen that mostly involved my tiny body being crammed into some of the harder-to-reach spaces for a heavy duty cleaning job. It was hard, tedious work, and gods-know what kind of grime coated my body. It almost looked like a second skin by the time I was done. 

I recall seeing my reflection during this period and thinking “The Walking Dead _wishes_ they could hire me.”

I wasn’t the most sociable child, but I wasn’t completely alone either. Of course, the eldest apprentices would outright ignore me, and the youngest were too young to hold proper conversations, but I found companionship within the two other kids who ran the same floor-scrubbing routes I did.

Takumi and Sayu (my self-proclaimed mentors and friends) were nice children. Nice-ish. Sayu delighted in making me cringe, and had no qualms about forcing me to capture and bring her various insects, while Takumi had all the tact of a drunk elephant. Once they realized that I wasn’t a loud version of the snot-nosed brat archetype that seemed to plague the district, they informed me that I was their little brother, which I later found translated to “please do our chores because we’re older.” For all their teasing though, they really did care for me.

Whether it was pity or a misplaced sense of duty, they did their best to answer most of my questions, and attempted to show me affection by offering me dust balls (Sayu) or demonstrating how to run through the halls without getting caught (Takumi). I returned their actions by foisting my green peppers onto them during mealtime. They probably knew that it was because I hated the taste of those horrid green vegetables, but they never retaliated, instead choosing to ruffle my hair like a disobedient puppy.

Between completing menial tasks, scrubbing down floors, and my weekly vent sessions with Tsubaki, life wasn’t the most stimulating. However, as much as I internally complained, I was usually exhausted by the end of the day, and I couldn’t exactly find it in me to devise an “escape the dreary monotony of life!” type of plan. I would be the first to admit I hated living within the perfumed walls of the brothel, but the alternative situations kept my mouth firmly shut. There was enough brutality in the area to know first-hand how cruel people were.

This routine continued until I turned six, and my life was once again interrupted by the same damn guy that almost booted me into a flaming hot garbage disposal.

It was a normal morning, when I overheard him muttering and cursing the ongoing war (which I had little to no information on beyond the fact there was a war) and I almost passed by until he began to bemoan the state of the “Land of Fire”. He then completed his colorful monologue by cursing shinobi to hell and back for his financial problems.

I put two and two together, and connected the occasional glimpses of people in flak jackets and headbands to his words. I’m surprised it took me as long as it did, but the revelation was enough to make me, a fairly reticent and shy child, drop the basket of towels I had been carrying and burst into a screaming meltdown of tears and flailing limbs.

Surprise! I hadn’t just been born into a different timeline, oh no. I was reborn into a goddamn Shonen Jump manga I had read in my previous life.

Naruto. I was living in the world of Naruto.

The thought of Kishimoto possibly being an all-seeing god lording over the denizens (me) of the land was terrifying enough to send me into another round of ear-splitting wails. You thought the moon aliens were scary? Try imagining your entire life is being dictated by a middle-aged Japanese man.

I was so, _so_ fucked.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this chapter really didn't want to write itself. I managed to finish it though! Surprise?  
> Not edited.

The very first thing I tried to do after this ground-breaking revelation was use chakra.

I was scared, sure, but the benefits outweighed the downsides. The likelihood I’d be dragged into shinobi life was nil (how the hell would I even get to Konoha?) and I assuaged my nerves by telling myself that it’d be insanely “hip and cool” to _not_ get tired when lugging around pounds and pounds of dirty fabric each day.

Okay, maybe the whole hey-you’re-in-Naruto shebang got to my head a little too fast. 

But can you really blame me? Beyond the abject terror of knowing that it was literally a world of murder out there, it was thrilling to know that you were capable of so much more. I had the potential to perform inhuman feats with my body. I had the potential to use the elements, or even the power to move faster than the speed of light.

Run on trees? Sure. Become a living version of a Cirque Du Soleil fire juggler? Bring it on.

It was a mixture of nerves and my favorite philosophy (out of sight out of mind) that drove me to start wrangling chakra.

My logic went a little something like this: I wasn’t born into a ninja hotspot → Nobody notices the brat of a prostitute → I can freely use chakra in civilian territory → I would be marginally safer after learning → (bonus!) I wouldn’t exhaust the living shit out of myself. 

It was a win-win situation for me. It’d be alright for me to stretch my metaphysical limbs and do some of those stick-leaf-to-forehead exercises, and I wouldn’t get caught and shipped off to the front lines of whichever shinobi war was going on.

Can I get a cheer for child soldiers? Love me some good ol’ kiddie murder.

Back to the chakra control thing. I’d love to pretend I was some kind of prodigy, and I grasped the mechanisms in residing in my body within a day. Rather than unlocking “boundless reserves of energy” or “sensing the warmth of my core,” I gave myself indigestion by placing too much pressure on my abdomen.

It was truly a stellar first try.

I tried my darn hardest to recall the methods that had been mentioned in the series, I really did. But the problem was that it had been years since I had seen hide or hair of the original media, and my memory of the series was whittled down to information that had stuck in my brain from Wiki pages, fanart that I had printed out, and a smattering of Youtube clips.

If you held me at gunpoint and demanded I list all the clans, I’d say my last words. (It was a completely different story if you asked me to go ahead and sing Silhouette though. I could even throw in some air guitar riffs while I was at it.)

The point is, I didn’t have any ideas on how I would harness the mystical energy that supposedly existed within my body. Jutsu? Don’t make me laugh, I don’t even think I could strengthen my pinky.

And then, of course, the question as to whether or not I even _had_ enough chakra was another problem entirely. 

I genuinely couldn’t tell the difference within the body I currently had versus the one I had worn in the Before. There wasn’t a gap as to how I perceived my limbs (sans having memories of being taller), and it was nigh impossible to make a comparison at this point. 

The possibility that I just had an abysmally tiny reserve of chakra was another path of thought that I didn’t want to go down. What’s the point of being born into a ninja magic world without having the ability to do any ninja magic?

Several stomach cramps later, I temporarily set aside (read, abandoned) my plans and decided to try out the Rock Lee method of ninja-ism. If you can’t ninjutsu it away, your burning passions and fists are the next best thing!

I proceeded to up my daily regimen of chores, and instead of explosively growing my strength, I ended up nursing my jelly-like muscles as I quivered in pain from all the strain. Apparently even in the Naruto-verse, a six year old can’t sprint around doing weight training without their limbs resembling cooked spaghetti.

Takumi was delighted that I was tuning into my athletic side, and immediately joined me in running around the halls. That ended in both our ears being boxed by an irate servant, but he leapt at any opportunity that had to do with bulking up my shrimpy body.

About two weeks later, I was left breathless and gasping after a race (I lost miserably) against Takumi and Sayu, who had left me to my own devices after gloating about their victory.

While I was massaging my sore calf muscles, I was left blankly staring at the ceiling as I contemplated my future. I had no idea which war I was born into. Second? Third? Fourth? How many wars _were_ there in the first place? Was this even the timeline I (kind of) knew? Holy shit, could I have been born into Boruto?

I stopped myself before I went down that line of thought. Some ideas should never be explored.

Apparently somewhere between trying to squeeze the dredges of my memory for all the brutal, bloody details of widespread fighting and exactly where the reanimated dead, aliens, and giant spiritual beasts fit in, I passed out.

It was from a mixture of stress and physical exhaustion, but it taught me a good lesson: I was shit at multitasking.

+++

Funnily enough, my breakthrough came from Tsubaki.

“Brat,” Tsubaki, began, eyes firmly fixed upon her reflection in the mirror. Her features were surprisingly placid after going on a furious rampage about the stench of her latest customer. Even with how terrifying her mood switches were, it was honestly impressive how fast she could paste on a smile.

“How old are you now?”

Transfixed by the way the teeth of the comb slid through her hair, I almost missed the innocuously-phrased question. She had really nice hair. It was long, dark, and there was never a strand out of place, even if she was stomping around the room while screaming.

“I am six now, miss.” 

Or so I assumed.

Sure, I may have claimed I was six, but there were no birthday celebrations for me, so my exact age was mostly guesswork. I think I was born sometime around the summertime though.

My first memories are mostly me shivering during the winter seasons, and I really only gained proper sentience post the Dropped-On-My-Head incident, so I could’ve lost a few months in the process. Still, calendars kept track of the passage of years well enough for me, so I knew I had been in the Naruto-verse for a solid six years now.

“Hm.” She paused her brushing. “You’re getting old.” Another pause.

“Do I look old to you?”

I blinked, and carefully raised my face to look at her. Her narrowed eyes met mine, and I felt a trickle of cold sweat trail down my back at her hawkish stare. Tsubaki didn’t look a day over seventeen, and that made it more than a little disconcerting to think about the fact that she was my mother.

“...Not at all, miss.”

She nodded, and set down her comb with an audible _clack._ “Brat,” she repeated. “I heard you’ve been running around with the rest of the local spawn?”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “Just...just a little bit, miss.” This, by all accounts, was a bare-faced lie, and I still had the bruises from slamming into a doorframe to prove it. 

Tsubaki probably knew that too, but she made no indication she noticed, which was a relief. I had once seen her send a customer out of her room with a set of broken legs, and if I incurred her wrath, my puny little form would probably be punted right into orbit, right alongside whatever space junk was floating around the planet.

She was scary. In a very homicidal way.

Puffing out a breath that could be construed as laughter, she made a motion with her hand that either meant get-the-fuck-out-of-the-room or get-me-my-other-hairbrush. Judging by the way her gaze slid to the lacquered boxes next to me, I made a hasty decision and pulled out a hefty-looking implement that looked like it was more spikes then bristles.

“Your birthday passed,” Tsubaki said, curling the ends of her hair around the torture device. “You can take this.”

With a fluid movement, she pulled something from her dresser, and tossed it at my face. Being too startled to move, it smacked dead-center in my forehead, and I fell backwards from where I was sitting in seiza with a yelp.

“Hm.” She said, and eyed me like I was a particularly offensive insect. “Leave.”

“Thank you,” I said, and all but shoved the object into my obi. “Thank you very much, miss.”

Tsubaki raised a painted eyebrow at me, and I scrambled from her room without a moment to spare. Judging by the way it was rustling alongside the fabric, she had gifted me some sort of scroll.

(By some miracle, the language system remained the same from the Before, and I could read and write, albeit slowly. My linguistic prowess was miles behind what it once had been, but considering that Takumi could barely even spell his name, I was grateful all the same.)

After I arrived at a dimly lit corner of the building, I snuck a furtive glance around before taking a peek at the scroll.

“Wow.”

That was really all I could say. Tsubaki, by some psychic stroke of luck, had bestowed a diagram of chakra systems to me. Forget reading, I had _pictures._ Forget trying to sense things, I now had a cheat sheet telling me exactly which places I should start focusing on to get a better sense of flow.

Sayu found me in that moment, dancing around in victory, and she dissolved into a fit of wheezing laughter.

(And despite what she insists, no, I was not kissing the paper. I swear.)


End file.
